In your speech at CPAC Hungary, you were talking about the spiritual dimensions of the political struggle in the West and in the US. Among European and in Hungarian Conservatives this vision does not seem to be widespread. What is your experience with this?
- Europe consists of so many individual national experiences, so it is hard for me to come up with a general theme. I'll just say what I've learned in America. The first thing is, Christians in America say Our Father all the time. Our Father says: Your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Well, if you really think about those words, it's a wake-up call: God's telling us that while we live our days here on Earth, we need to be doing what He tells us to do. In America it was unique because almost everyone was a Christian. Almost everyone was a little bit of a renegade Christian. They didn't want to be Catholic and didn’t want to be associated with a monarch. All these reasons then led to a whole talented group of people that wanted to come to America. Young people, who really did believe that they were there because God put them there. That's when the whole thing started in America. The United States was never overly religious, but there was always a genuflection to the idea that God had a great idea in sending all these people to America so that they could create this great nation. God has blessed America. We have all these natural resources. A huge country, ocean to ocean, right? Almost everything you could ever need. We have. That cannot be an accident. The question is what do we do in return?
The biggest problem America has is that down here we not thank God. We don't even like God. We almost curse God. We mock God.
We don't think we need God. And that is why we're failing. But the good news is that we're seeing both a secularization of America, and at the same time, there's this new zeal amongst Christian believers. These are going to collide. I obviously hope the religious side wins the conflict, but that's what's coming next.
Do American Christians tend to be passive in politics or elections due to moral concerns? If we look at the current American elections, many see Joe Biden making several bad decisions from a Christian viewpoint, but Donald Trump also made some morally controversial statements regarding the abortion issue or past moral scandals. Christians often see politics as a dirty thing that they must stay away from, because they cannot find politicians, who totally fits the requirements of the ten commandments. Do you see any risk in this attitude?
- I think Christians for a long time thought that politics was dirty, and they could stay out of politics. But in the last few years, a couple things happened that never happened before. The first was an apparent attack on children and gender. The number one pusher of that ideology was the Walt Disney Company, this great American company. Walt Disney himself back in the day, but his company has turned into a perverted mess trying to get kids to be sexualized at young ages and to question their gender. It infuriated people.
Christians have to understand, there is no “Switzerland” on these questions.
They thought there was “Switzerland”. A safe, neutral, where they can stay and not be involved in politics. But when Christians are neutral, Atheists and Secularists take over the territory. In America, we had God in all of our schools. Never was a problem. We didn't have an established church, but we had religion in our schools. We took religion out of our schools. We took religion out of our government. We took religion out of our public buildings. We took down the statues. We removed the prayers and the references. We thought that we'd be Switzerland, that we just wouldn't talk about God in public buildings. But when we took God out of the buildings, the hard Left came in, the God-haters, and replaced those prayers and those statues. Now they're erecting statues of Lucifer. It's stupid to keep taking them at the word that they'll be fair in this process. There's no neutrality in the wars that are going on, the woke-wars, the culture wars. This is what's happening in our country.
But do the Christian communities realize that this is the issue?
- More than ever before. It’s one of the reasons Trump will win. In 2016, most of the Evangelicals voted for Trump, but he wasn’t as popular among the Catholics. Among the practicing Catholics, who go to church, Trump is very popular.
He got a majority of the Catholic votes in 2016. I believe Joe Biden got a majority in 2020. It is disgusting that Joe Biden's going through abortion clinics, making the sign of the cross and that's how he wants to be the president of the United States. Look, I think a lot of Christians in America have been sleeping. I said in my speech, Jesus took the apostles he loved, brought them to the garden of Getsemane and asked them: Can you stay up an hour and pray with me? He was getting ready for his test, the last supper, the crucifixion, the way of the cross. But they fell asleep. I never could understand that when I read that as a kid. How could you fall asleep with Jesus Christ? But now I understand.
We get scared and we are weak, we tremble and we back down. That is what is happening in America.
There's not that many communists in America, but the good people back down when they get threatened. That's not going to happen anymore. Donald Trump has changed the whole dynamic in terms of how you fight back. You've got to fight back very aggressively.
We see horrible scenes unfolding on the American ivy league university campuses. Hundreds of Anti-Israel, Antisemitic, Jew-hating marches and protests. What could be the reason behind them going viral right now? Several protests took place since the beginning of the Gaza War. But after Iran attacked Israel, something seem to have changed. Who is behind all this? How did we get here?
Look, I think Hungary plays a very important role in saving western civilization. It's one of the reasons why we're so proud to be here. It's a small country. But as I told the prime minister, you're small but you're mighty. Your population and your GDP are not as important as your strength in fighting back against the EU and everyone. And I think that what's happening in America is that a small group of well-funded individuals who hate in America have successfully got us hating each other. It's an orchestrated campaign of agitation to get us to hate each other. And it takes different forms. There was George Floyd and BLM. We don't ever have a BLM riot anymore because the money is now moved from BLM. Now it's all about Hamas and Gaza.
On whose money?
Well, George Soros would be one of those people, but he's an old man now. I know his son oversees that empire. But he is not alone in doing that. I think most of the big billionaires we know fund this activity. I also think they do a pretty good job of hiding. I am 56 years old and what I saw in the last 20 years is that
every other year there is a wave of protests that grips the country. Always all new t-shirts, all new bumperstickers.
How do they have everything? I think it's the best marketing firms in the world help come up with their slogans. They pick the timing. They exploit true tragedies. And they try to destroy the country. Enough Americans have woken up to this idea that it is just another thing. It will be another thing tomorrow. What will be the big cause between today and election day in America? I don't know, but it will be something. They will have all the t-shirts, they'll have all the riot gear, they will have all of the tools they need to disrupt society. My news media back home will lie about why it's happening. They will say it's spontaneous. It is coming from people's hearts. That’s bullshit.
Why are they so successful in the universities?
Do you understand how left-wing our universities are? You probably don't have this experience in Hungary, but they are really the most hard-core left institutions.
But why do they let these protests go on?
Because we don't want to be disliked at the board meeting. If you get asked to be on the board of one of these institutions and they say, we should all support Black Lives Matter because we want to help black people. You might think they are communist, and you don’t want to support them, but you probably won't say anything. America has lost its birthright because America is too scared to speak up. Now it might be too late to reverse the course, but I think that dynamic is changing. They're losing donors left and right. Now maybe they don't care because they have a multi-billion dollar downward. But eventually these institutions must crash. That's the only choice we have. Our media institutions must crash. At the same time those institutions crash, the small Christian universities, they're growing like crazy. They have waiting lists and their applications to acceptance as off the charts. American parents hate what's happening to their kids, and they're scared to send them to those universities. It might be too late, but I'm betting on the fact that it's not.
There is a debate going on on the American right about how to support Israel. For example, Candice Owens recently had a huge debate with Ben Shapiro on this issue that ended in her leaving. Tucker Carlson and several figures in the American right were debating that whether the US should support military Israel in this issue. What is this debate about?
- Well, we have neocons within the conservative coalition. They are former liberals, former socialists who hated the former Soviet Union. They became Reagan supporters because they agreed with the Cold War, but they didn't necessarily agree with Reagan on everything. Over time, there wasn't ever a military situation where they didn't want to use our military and get involved. Over time that became less and less and less popular. In fact, Reagan didn't really want to use the military. He had a policy of peace through strength, so he wanted to have a strong military built it up. He also built up the economy because you must have the resources so that the people who hated us, China, the Soviet Union, they think twice before attacking America. Donald Trump resurrected that policy and didn't really want to use the military. George W. Bush was the opposite of that. He used the military aggressively in several places. Afghanistan and Iraq now look at such massive failures that there's a lot of conservatives that say, I like this idea of we don't have to get involved in everything. Now, the media says that's because you are isolationists. I don't think that's a fair charge.
I think there's a difference between being careful and humble with your military and never wanting to engage the world.
There are people that believe that America too often is too aligned only with Israel and needs to also have relationships with modern Arab states. Jared Kushner, in the White House of Donald Trump, was able to lead the Mike Pompeo and others as well on the Abraham Accords. And that was an attempt to say, how do we do commerce with these more modern Arab states? I think you could do both. I think you could be pro-Israel and believe that Israel should be able to wipe Hamas off the face of the Earth and still believe that we don't want to be imbalanced in our Middle East policy that it's always Israel and never these other countries. I think Trump can resurrect this idea. Iran will have nuclear weapons because of Barack Obama. And that will be civilization’s worst nightmare. I think we should help Israel. I think if Israel is wiped off the face of the Earth, America is next. That it's kind of like civilization is dangling by a thread by the grace of God. And we have to nurture and protect that. We for threat around it make it stronger. And I think Israel helps to do that.
Hungary is a small country, with small GDP, why do you think we are so significant, and why do many people look up to us in the US?
- It's very simple. In a modern world where people are scared to lead and talk about what's true and what's not true, you have a prime minister and a people behind him that lead. He leads on the important questions. Now you're right, as far as the size and scope of your country, his voice should be drowned out. But when everyone else is quiet, he's saying no. When we first came to Hungary three years ago, people are like, why are you going there? Their prime minister is a dictator, he's fascist, the people are mean, they're racist. And I had people say the worst things, even in media said the worst things. I came over, I didn't know what to expect. Three years after doing this, a lot of people in America are saying, I love that you're going to Hungary. They're so great because in three years, what's happened in all these cultural questions, everything's gotten worse, much worse. When people are waking up to the fact that it's OK to say you're Christian. It's OK to say you're Jewish. It's OK to say you're religious. It's OK to say you're patriotic. It's OK to say that you care about your country first, you're not going to fly any other flag or your country's flag. And that's not racist. That's patriotism. That's a good thing. So, these ideas that Orban understood immediately starting with immigration, that if you have unfettered immigration, illegal immigration to your country, you won't have a country. It was your prime minister who stood up on these issues. He led, when the Pope was silent. He led when the American president was silent. He led what the EU was calling him terrible names. What if more people would lead? What if more small, medium, and large sized countries had leaders that spoke up? That's why Hungary is important. Your prime minister is a smart man, he studies issues and he decides when he's going to speak. And now when he speaks, the whole world's listening.
